Bing Attacks Google Shopper in New Ad Campaign

Microsoft launched a holiday themed ad campaign attacking Google on Thursday. The smear campaign is aimed at online shoppers and promotes Microsoft’s Bing search engine over Google’s for holiday bargain hunting. The “Scroogle” campaign, as it’s known, focuses on Shopper, Google’s product search engine. With the tag line “Don’t get Scroogled,” Microsoft hopes to bring attention to Google Shopper’s inorganic search results. The search engine only displays results from products and merchants that pay the company a fee.

Google introduced plans to change it’s product search on May 31, 2012, in what Microsoft calls an “under-the-radar announcement.” In that announcement, Google stated it was transitioning Google Product Search to “a purely commercial model built on Product Listing Ads.” The new Google Shopper went live October 17, 2012. Microsoft claims that when a search engine limits choices and ranks them by payment “consumers get Scroogled.”

According to Bing Senior Director Stefan Weitz, Bing Shopping results are based only on relevancy. “Bing results incorporate top deals from merchants across the Web and the rankings you see aren’t dependent on which advertisers paid to have their products listed.” Weitz added that Bing provides a number of tools to assist online shoppers, such as “aggregated expert and consumer reviews, product specs, related products, and many other filters.” He says shoppers can use bing to “get a great deal without having to dig through a ton of advertisements.”

Critics of the “Scroogled” campaign call it hypocritical. Bing also partners with merchants, the most notable of them being Shopping.com. The two announced a partnership last year with the search engine stating that paid offers would be “highlighted throughout Bing Shopping, including search results and product pages.” Weitz claims this model differs significantly from Google’s as Bing Shopping “includes millions of free listings” and ads are “listed separately and labeled clearly.”

Google has not responded to the “Scroogle” campaign directly. When reached for comment, the company issued a statement saying “Google is a great resource for shoppers to find what they need, at great prices for their loved ones this holiday season.”